The pkg_info command is used to dump out information for
packages, as created by
pkg_create(1), which may be
still packed up or already installed on the system with the
pkg_add(1) command.

The pkg-name may be the name of an installed
package, the pathname to a package distribution file, or a URL to a package
available through FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, or SCP. pkg_info
will try to complete pkg-name with a version number
while looking through installed packages.

When browsing through uninstalled packages, running
pkg_info -I *.tgz will report a summary line for
each package, so that it is possible to run pkg_info
pkgname.tgz to obtain a longer package description, and
pkg_add -n pkgname.tgz to check that the
installation would proceed cleanly, including dependencies.

This option allows you to test for the presence of another (perhaps
prerequisite) package from a script. If the package identified by
pkg-name is currently installed, return 0, otherwise
return 1. In addition, the names of any package(s) found installed are
printed to stdout unless turned off using the -q
option.

The given pkg-name is actually a package
specification, as described in
packages-specs(7).
For example, pkg_info -e 'name->=1.3' will
match versions 1.3 and later of the name
package.

Another variant of this option that uses a pkgpath instead. A pkgpath is a
location within the ports tree, as described in
pkgpath(7). For example,
pkg_info -e x11/kde/base3 will match any package
that was compiled according to
${PORTSDIR}/x11/kde/base3.

Prefix each information category header (see -q)
shown with str. This is primarily of use to
front-end programs that want to request a lot of different information
fields at once for a package, but don't necessarily want the output
intermingled in such a way that they can't organize it. This lets you add
a special token to the start of each field.

Show the update signature for each package. The ‘update
signature’ is a unique tag showing the package name, and the
version number of every run time dependency and shared library used to
build this package.

Fuzzy listing option, often used together with -m.
Only shows stems, flavors and branches information. To be reused with
pkg_add(1)-l to recreate a package installation with
different versions and no ambiguity.

This can be used to specify a colon-separated list of paths to search for
package files. The current directory is always searched first, even if
PKG_PATH is set. If
PKG_PATH is used, the suffix “.tgz”
is automatically appended to the pkg-name, whereas
searching in the current directory uses pkg-name
literally.